Shanspirations

In my quest to turn my life-long night owl self into a morning person, I’ve felt like a detective trying to track clues to solve a mystery.  At last, I am getting to find out what it is like to enjoy getting up early when I thought it would always be drudgery.  (To read about the prior pieces of the puzzle that set the stage for what comes next, please read my prior posts on sleep here and here).

I wrote in earlier posts that after I had done cycles of free-running sleep twice and tried going outside first thing in the morning, in addition to regularly going to bed early each night, all of this was not enough.  I still couldn’t fall asleep early at night.  I’d go to bed and lie awake for hours. Each morning I felt horrible getting up and continued to feel bad all day because I just hadn’t gotten enough sleep.  The only way to feel rested was to sleep in, perhaps until 10 or 11 o’clock!  But sleeping in embarrassed me.  I didn’t want to start my day at a time when other people were well into theirs.  Yet I also hated feeling lousy!  I really wanted a solution.

I was learning that light causes the body to suppress melatonin, an important hormone that affects sleep and many other aspects of our body rhythm. When you are making lots of melatonin you feel sleepy. But when your body suppresses melatonin, you feel awake. One way experts recommend improving sleep is to expose yourself to bright outdoors light first thing in the morning.  By turning off the melatonin early in the day, you begin to to reset your circadian clock, as melatonin plays an important role in keeping a daily pattern. Bright light that comes at particular times in the day sets your circadian clock. If your circadian clock gets used to shutting melatonin production early each morning, it may also aid your body to begin producing melatonin at the appropriate times at night to help you sleep.  In theory, a nice regular schedule should result if you keep going to bed early and getting up early.

Now in practice, this did not happen for me at all. I thought regular bright light in the morning slowed down my normal process of drifting to later and later times of falling asleep, but not enough — what I wanted was to stop my sleep time from “drifting” altogether.

And this is where came my breakthrough! I’d been reading that not all wavelengths of light have the same effects on melatonin production. (see here.) As an example, for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), light therapy reduces patients’ symptoms. But some wavelengths of light work better than others. White and blue light help people feel wakeful and energized. Yet red light doesn’t. In the presence of red light alone, people’s melatonin levels begin to rise and they grow sleepy.

At the same time I was reading an account of British sleep history and learning about a fascinating phenomenon called “first” and “second sleep” that many people once used to experience, especially in the winter.  Reflecting on what people did in the past spurred me to imagine what it was like when there was no artificial lighting except candlelight, oil lamps or firelight.  I wondered if candlelight contained a high concentration of red light since just by looking I could see that ordinary light bulbs contain more blue and green hues than candlelight does.

Candlelight seems warm, with hues of red and orange-gold. It’s also a much lower light intensity. In searching for information on whether candles contain a large percentage of red light, I found these statements over here: (italics mine)

“Examples of odd (unbalanced) lighting:

Candles and campfires contain an excess of red. So do sunsets…”

“Examples of color temperatures:
Sun, 5000 K (has a lot of blue)
Photoflood lamp, 3200 K, an approximation of outdoor lighting
Tungsten lamp, 2850 K, looks orange, less blue.
Candle, 1800 K, distinctly red, almost no blue.“

I wondered if there were big differences in artificial lighting’s effect on sleep patterns today from what flame light’s effects would have been in times past. Having never been without artificial lighting in the evening except once during an ice storm, I didn’t know what it would be like to manage with only candlelight night after night. But I wanted to try. I kept thinking, What if it’s the artificial lighting combined with being naturally wired a night owl that has made it so hard for me to sleep?  What if I’m more sensitive to certain wavelengths of light than many other people are and these wavelengths alter my circadian rhythm?

I told my husband my idea and asked him if we could try an experiment.  For one week, we would turn off all our normal lights around sunset and use only candles until we went to bed. He thought this would be hard because we do so much in the evenings, but said he would do it with me. After all, he didn’t want me being a night owl either. We’ve always wished to share the same schedule.

We began a routine each night of going about the house lighting candles, then turning out our other lights. We’d eat and sip tea by candlelight, talking and relaxing.  It seemed that not having brighter lights helped us enjoy our evenings more. We’d mosey around getting ready for bed and gradually I would find myself getting sleepier, actually yawning. It only took a night or two for us to be amazed! We would start feeling sleepy perhaps an hour or two into the candlelit evening and we’d want to get ready for bed and turn in early. The astounding part was that I was genuinely sleepy and could actually fall asleep!  I began getting a good night’s sleep and feeling ready to get up bright and early in the morning.

I couldn’t understand why I’d never heard anything like this before. Once we’d tried candlelight, it seemed far simpler a solution than one would expect for a vexing life-long problem. But when I searched online and in the books I had on sleep, I found no mention of it. The science about light’s effects was all there (at least what’s discovered so far), but I couldn’t find where someone had made this direct application from the scientific information that, perhaps, candlelight could actually help aid you in feeling sleepy when normal artificial lights don’t.

I find candlelight to be calming and peaceful; where before I used to dread getting ready for bed and wanted to stay up and get things done, now I love to start winding down for bed. I love the glow of candlelight about the house, the way it makes me look like a teenager again in the bathroom mirror as I’m brushing my teeth, and how it makes the ordinary process of shutting down the house seem delightful instead of mundane.

At this writing, it’s been 34 days that we’ve been using candlelight and I am getting up mornings with no alarm clock, just feeling ready to get up.

This has been a fascinating adventure for me. I keep saying again and again, Thanks, Lord, for letting me see and understand things that would help so much. I’ve wanted this for so many years. Sometimes when dreams come true, it’s all the more wonderful because you’ve waited and gone without them for so long.

Update:  This article was edited and shortened on Sept. 25, 2008. It has been 2 years and four months since my original post. My family has since switched from candlelight to using special light bulbs without blue light. They are amber colored. Now we simply switch off our regular lights and turn on lamps with amber bulbs each night several hours before we’re ready to go to bed.

We did not switch from candlelight because the amber bulbs work better; actually, in my experience, nothing works as well as candlelight!  (By candlelight, I am referring to any kind of flame light with the exception of kerosene lamps.  We tried olive oil lamps, too, and loved them).  But candlelight has certain disadvantages.  If you use candles regularly, smog may collect on the walls above where you use the flame.  Plus, there is greater danger of fire.  For convenience, we purchased no-blue-light bulbs and have been very pleased with them. We also bought an amber screen to put over our computer so that we can still work on the computer at night.

The ideas I described in this post have stuck for my family.   We use them to this day.  I felt the absolute best when I followed the sun’s schedule, but currently we aren’t doing that.  I go to bed around 10:30 or 11:00 most nights; because I need a full 9 hours of sleep to feel my best, usually I’m content to get up at 7:30 or 8:00 o’clock.  For someone who used to need to sleep until 10 or 11 o’clock to feel rested since she couldn’t sleep at night, that is tremendous.  Since many night owls only need 7-8 hours of sleep, the results for them can be more spectacular even than mine.  But I continue to rejoice in the lasting change “candlelight” made in my life.  I wish everybody who has sleep problems knew about it!

More Articles:

Sleep Stages and an Update on How We’re Doing with the Candlelight Plan

A Way to Have “Candlelight” without Candles!

Discovery of Someone Else Who Found Candlelight Helps Sleep

Tools for Candlelight Sleep Plan

Joyous Sleep (most recent)

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 8:07 am and is filed under Health and Self-Help, Shanspiration Series, Sleep and Chronobiology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.